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Updated: May 12, 2025
It is peculiarly tantalising that our knowledge should be almost at its scantiest in the very direction in which we should like to know most, and in which there was most reason to hope that our curiosity might have been gratified. Of Voltaire's relations with the circle of Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke only the most meagre details have reached us.
And, lastly, he fixed the date of the death of the nameless captive; who "was buried," he says, "in 1704., by night, in the parish church of Saint-Paul." Voltaire's narrative coincided with the account given in the 'Memoires de Peyse', save for the omission of the incident which, according to the 'Memoires', led in the first instance to the imprisonment of Giafer.
The correspondence between them had been suffered to drop, but that she continued present to his thoughts was sufficiently indicated by the souvenirs he collected specially for her: the views of the scenes he visited, the Alpenrosen he gathered for her in its native home, Voltaire's autograph.
"Maupertuis has not easygoing springs," the poet wrote to his niece; "he takes my dimensions sternly with his quadrant. It is said that a little envy enters into his calculations." Already Voltaire's touchy vanity was shying at the rivals he encountered in the king's favor.
The King pensioned the successful poet; and the coffee-houses pronounced that Voltaire was a clever man, but that the real tragic inspiration, the celestial fire which had glowed in Corneille and Racine, was to be found in Crebillon alone. The blow went to Voltaire's heart.
Nowhere is the excellence of Voltaire's style more conspicuous than in his Correspondence, which forms so large and important a portion of his work. A more delightful and a more indefatigable letter-writer never lived.
Father Pallou, his confessor, accustomed to read the heart, said, as he shook his head, "This, child is devoured with a thirst for celebrity." Even at school and among the Jesuits, that passion for getting talked about, which was one of the weaknesses of Voltaire's character, as well as one of the sources of his influence, was already to a certain extent gratified.
According to this, the earthquake at Lisbon, Voltaire's favorite instance, destroyed thousands of persons, because it is in the nature of things that subterraneous vapors should explode, and that when houses fall on human beings they should be killed. Then if Dr.
It is not given, we all know, even to the most original and daring of leaders, to be without precursors, and Voltaire's march was prepared for him before he was born, as it is for all mortals. Yet he impressed on all he said, on good words and bad alike, a marked autochthonic quality, as of the self-raised spontaneous products of some miraculous soil, from which prodigies and portents spring.
At eighteen he could read, write, and cipher; he had read Rollin, Robertson, Voltaire's Charles XII., Brown's Essays, Captain Cook, and parts of Locke. This, according to his own account, was the sum of his knowledge, except that he had fully imbibed his father's decided republican opinions.
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